Isaac Arthur
The vast gulfs between stars may take decades or even centuries to travel, requiring enormous generation ships carrying families and whole ecosystems with them.
NASA’s Dragonfly to Proceed with Final Mission Design Work
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/drago … sign-work/
Multi-world will not be a flag planting mission it will involve Domes and Cave and sub-surface colony and keeping humans alive and healthy for long periods in the harsh offworld environments
Juno’s Ganymede Close-up
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/juno … -close-up/
Two more missions to Jupiter will arrive one from ESA and another from NASA/JPL
https://web.archive.org/web/20160610230 … 202015.pdf
,
]]>Thanks for the recommendation I may very well order the book.
Done.
]]>You posted an interesting idea, and I hope you will continue developing this kernel of an idea.
It seems to me that small non-intelligent biological structures ** are ** machines.
Those who are pursuing the field of Nanotechnology will ultimately be working at the level of individual atoms, where biological structures operate.
If you are looking for some light bedtime reading, I can recommend "Engines of Creation" by K. Eric Drexler.
(th)
]]>Done
]]>Thank you for developing these ideas!
For Calliban ... while it cannot be guaranteed to last over an extended period of time, it appears that artificial intelligence can be given a bias toward service. I agree that if replication is included in the package, then errors will/may occur over time, so the bias may weaken, but perhaps it will also increase.
In any case, this discussion is well within the province of science fiction writers, so I'm hoping any forum members who try to keep up with the prolific outpouring of science fiction will keep watch for any stories or novels that pursue these ideas.
If there is a forum reader who would like to contribute, and is not currently registered, please see the Recruiting topic for procedure.
(th)
]]>We could programme the machines to build habitats for humans and plants, but the relationship is one-sided. The humand and plants are a parasitic burden on the machines. The idea of a cyborg lifeform, with machines integrated into it to provide additional capabilities, is an old one. But the machine elements are not generally imagined to be self-replicating. The idea of self-replicating Von Neuman machines, functioning as interstellar seeds for life, is also an old one. But again, any machine advanced enough to do this, has no need for the humans, plants and animals that it would be building the habitat for. So this isn't symbiosis.
]]>The only thing I had similar was to drop microbes into oceans and those microbes would have multiple stored genomes that were put into silence until needed to make the next organism.
Yours goes deeper.
Done
]]>Things I find improbable about Sagan's concept are that: (1) Such life would grow and metabolise extremely slowly, due to the weakness of sunlight; (2) Such life would exist in extreme cold. Finding a solvent that would work in deep cryogenic temperatures would be difficult.
However, one of the most interesting concepts in biology is symbiosis. Two lifeforms living together for mutual benefit. If humanity moves into space, it will be employing symbiosis. Humans will provide warm, pressurised and lit environments for plants. Plants will provide food and oxygen.
Perhaps we could take this further to imagine a symbiosis between plants and machines. Plants convert concentrated sunlight into sugar and oxygen. This could be fuel for machines, which would convert local materials into habitats for more plants. In some cases, nano-machines could be integral parts of the plant itself, producing external films that protect it from vacuum and storing oxygen which the plant needs. We could imagine machine-plant hybrids out in the kuiper belt. Machines would construct habitat-trees on comets, using sunlight energy to extract nutrients from comet materials and convey them them to pods, containing the plant elements, that produce the sugar and oxygen that keep the plants and machines alive. The pods would be transparent glass or plastic spheres, located at the focus of foil mirrors. The tree itself would be a machine built structure. The plants are most likely to be algae, as these are most efficient at converting weak sunlight into sugar and oxygen.
The composite organism would propogate through seeds. These would consists of glass spheres containing algae and nanites, the latter of which would get to work building tree support structures when arriving at a new comet. Tree trunks would contain a large pressurised area for storing oxygen. This is where humans could live. The humans would consume excess food and oxygen from the tree. Their primary function is to carry the seeds to new cometary bodies as they spread and colonise.
We could ultimately envisage such a three-way symbiosis as being a Von Neuman machine allowing interstellar colonisation. A probe would carry seeds to another star system. These would contain frozen algae and human embryos. Upon reaching the new star, the probe would plant the seed on a suitable icy body. The seed mirror would unfurl, bringing the algae to life. The nanites would begin metabolising excess sugar and oxygen, reproducing and beggining the work of building the tree. As the tree grows, a central cavity forms, which fills with food and oxygen. Human embryos are grown within the cavity, the machine elements nurture them until they mature into adults. The adult humans then use the excess resources from the growing forest, to build the space craft needed to spread seeds throughout the whole system.
]]>That is interesting. I have in the past imagined building liquid filled elevator shafts for ice shell worlds, of which there may be many.
Borrowing from Issac Asimov, (I think), then you put a weighted oil in them to match the specific gravity of the ice around the shaft.
Of course, the pressures would be very high, but robots might be functional.
But I was wondering if for a world like Titan, if the core is hot, could you somehow generate power by the difference in the liquid ocean's temperature and that of the surface atmosphere?
Believe it or not, I do have a concern for alien life, and so that needs consideration, but the human race has some importance as well, in my calculations.
Done.
]]>https://twitter.com/EuropaClipper/statu … 4048218112
With all deployments complete, Juice is fully stretched out and ready for cruising to Jupiter
]]>'Space Elevator for Space-Resource Mining'
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio … rce_Mining
Yoji Ishikawa